Friday, November 15, 2013

Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge

Like his 1973 magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s new
novel, Bleeding Edge, takes place
over approximately nine crucial months of world history and offers a more complex
alternative to the typical “us and them” narrative that many have adopted as
the official story. Focusing on the New York of 2001 and early 2002, Bleeding Edge is a new kind of
historical novel, delving into the radical shifts in human consciousness
brought about by the Internet, video games, quake films, digital espionage,
cyber exploration, and other “bleeding-edge” technologies that just twelve
years later now actually seem generations old. Hilarious references to Netscape
and Final Fantasy abound, but 9/11 looms large, and the stakes here are real.

Maxine
Tarnow is a fraud investigator in New York who’s lost her license and is
working rogue, and when a colleague asks her to look into some cooked
accounting in the books of Gabriel Ice and his giant
Microsoft/Halliburton-style megafirm, her researches lead her into the Deep Web
and back up again to a world where paranoia is the norm and where reality is
often merely an avatar for the cyber systems that lay just a few clicks away.
While the premise may be something of a rehash of Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, the real-world
consequences here are much more pressing, and the swirl of elusive meanings have an
urgency that the earlier novel’s symbol-based conspiracies only play at.

Maxine
and her family, friends, and colleagues are also surprisingly rich and well
developed as individual characters who stand for something much more human than
some of the cardboard cutouts of Pynchon’s early works. This new earnestness
comes at an artistic cost, though, making this novel almost entirely
conventional in terms of how it works and what it offers to the reader. Pynchon’s
world is always complexly plotted, but the threads in this novel all make
perfect sense and find relatively harmonious resolution in the end, and while
the book offers us an alternate view of who we are in the new millennium, its
answers to the problems it explores still seem simpler than they should be.
Perhaps 9/11 has made Pynchon grow up, for better or worse.

That’s
not to say that Pynchon has become dull at all. His prose is uproariously
vibrant and compelling and is filled with relentless poetry and play, spouting
outlandish neologisms and novel imagery at every turn. While the current state
of Pynchon’s art may not be pushing the bleeding edge in the ways that Gravity’s Rainbow did, his comic vision
is nearly as absurd as ever and is never satisfied unless it outdoes itself,
and as a result Bleeding Edge is a
seriously funny book that’s also deadly serious.